In Nigeria, 70% of the HIV prevention money is for abstinence-only education.
In Zambia, the US administration dismantled the comprehensive social marketing system for condoms.
The condom crisis in Uganda happened at the same time as the popularization of abstinence-only education. This effectively dismantled their condom distribution system. (Emphasis added.)
The Bush administration has also instituted a prostitution loyalty oath, requiring care providers to not advocate for prostitution or legalization of prostitution.
Part of the problem is pervasive fundamentalist ideology, which has damaged previous successful programs and will be hard to undo without concerted activism in the long term. MUCH MORE
Abstinence only programs in the US are failing, and teen pregnancies and STD’s are rising; the evidence is pointing to “Abstinence only” as the culprit behind this alarming trend - but instead of accepting that abstinence only doesn’t work, the government is planning to spend even more on a program that is doomed to failure:
Teen Birth Rate Rises in U.S., Reversing a 14-Year Decline
By Rob Stein, Washington Post
Thursday, December 6, 2007After falling steadily for more than a decade, the birth rate for American teenagers jumped last year, federal health officials reported yesterday, a sharp reversal in what has been one of the nation’s most celebrated social and public health successes.
“This is concerning,” said Stephanie J. Ventura, who heads the center’s reproductive statistics branch. “It represents an interruption of 14 years of steady decline. Now unexpectedly we have an increase of 3 percent, which is a significant increase.”
While experts said it was unclear what may be causing the reversal, the new data reignited debate about abstinence-only sex-education programs, which receive about $176 million a year in federal funding. Congress is currently debating whether to increase that by $28 million.
“The United States is facing a teen-pregnancy health-care crisis, and the national policy of abstinence-only programs just isn’t working,” said Cecile Richard, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. (Emphasis added.)“It is time for everyone who cares about teenagers to start focusing on the common-sense solutions that will help solve this problem.” MORE
When we look at the impact of abstinence only programs as they relate to the global AIDS epidemic, the lives which are affected are not a few thousand, or even a hundred thousand, but number in the millions:
There were an estimated 1.7 million [1.4 – 2.4 million] new HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa in 2007—a significant reduction since 2001. However, the region remains most severely affected. An estimated 22.5 million [20.9 – 24.3 million] people living with HIV, or 68% of the global total, are in sub-Saharan Africa. Eight countries in this region now account for almost one-third of all new HIV infections and AIDS deaths globally. LINK
Admittedly, according to the WHO, AIDS infections have “leveled off,” however, if the US would have supported the use of condoms to prevent new AIDS infections, rather than remaining stagnant, or increasing ever so slightly, there’s little doubt the transmission rate of AIDS would have been substantially curtailed rather than remaining at a so-called “level rate.”
While the global prevalence of HIV infection—the percentage of people infected with HIV— has leveled off, the total number of people living with HIV is increasing because of ongoing acquisition of HIV infection, combined with longer survival times, in a continuously growing general population. LINK
